Facial Recognition System

Face
recognition technology is the least intrusive and fastest biometric technology.
It works with the most obvious individual identifier – the human face.

Instead of
requiring people to place their hand on a reader(a process not acceptable in
some cultures as well as being a source of illness transfer) or precisely
position their eye in front of a scanner, face recognition systems
unobtrusively take pictures of people's faces as they enter a defined area.
There is no intrusion or delay, and in most cases the subjects are entirely
unaware of the process. They do not feel "under surveillance" or that
their privacy has been invaded.

Technology

Facial
recognition analyzes the characteristics of a person's face images input
through a digital video camera. It measures the overall facial structure,
including distances between eyes, nose, mouth, and jaw edges. These measurements
are retained in a database and used as a comparison when a user stands before
the camera. This biometric has been widely, and perhaps wildly, touted as a
fantastic system for recognizing potential threats (whether terrorist, scam
artist, or known criminal) but so far has not seen wide acceptance in
high-level usage. It is projected that biometric facial recognition technology
will soon overtake fingerprint biometrics as the most popular form of user
authentication.

Every face
has numerous, distinguishable landmarks, the different peaks and valleys that
make up facial features. Each human face has approximately 80 nodal points.
Some of these measured by the Facial Recognition Technology are:

·Distance between
the eyes

·Width of the nose

·Depth of the eye
sockets

·The shape of the
cheekbones

·The length of the
jaw line

These nodal
points are measured creating a numerical code, called a faceprint, representing
the face in the database.

How it Works

The
following four-stage process illustrates the way biometric systems operate:

Capture - a physical
or behavioral sample is captured by the system during enrollment

Extraction - unique data
is extracted from the sample and a template is created

Comparison - the template
is then compared with a new sample

Matching - the system
then decides if the features extracted from the new sample are matching or not

1 to 1 verification

When the
user faces the camera, standing about two feet from it. The system will locate
the user's face and perform matches against the claimed identity or the facial
database. It is possible that the user may need to to move and reattempt the
verification based on his facial position. The system usually comes to a
decision in less than 5 seconds.

1 to Many identification

This method of identification determines a person’s identity
without any prior claim needed and answers the question, “Who are you?” It
substantiates an individual’s identity by comparing a scanned biometric
template against all stored biometric templates. The system using the
one-to-many approach finds an identity from a database rather than verifying a
claimed identity or searching a segmented portion of stored biometric templates.

The ideal solution

All of this
makes face recognition ideal for high traffic areas open to the general public,
such as: